SEGMENTATION PROJECTS AT UIC MEDICAL SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT TYLER

AnatLab was developed with the help of many different groups. Professors, students, and computer programmers used an annotator program, conceived and implemented specifically for AnatLab's development, to define the boundaries of each structure within each section of the Visible Human Male. Contributors include anatomy and neuroanatomy professors from the University of Illinois-Chicago College of Medicine. These educators have guided medical and biomedical visualization students in the completion of over 12,000 annotations.

Their work has been paramount to the success of AnatLab and has resulted in the integration of the system into first-year human anatomy courses at the UIC College of Medicine. Additional support has been provided by nursing students at the University of Texas-Tyler. Their work has been vital to the annotation of new objects and continuing quality control testing of the program.

Dr. Maurice Pescitelli of UIC worked with many UIC medical students in this multi-year segmentation project during intensive summer sessions. The last summer session focused primarily on brain anatomy.

The UTT Anatomy & Physiology (A & P) instructors assembled a team of annotators comprised of previous or current A & P students. As an effort to supplement the UTT A & P instructors' efforts, the team explored how AnatLab could be used in the A & P course. The team identified the course's main topics and created useful lists of anatomical objects linked to these main topics for use in 2D views and 3D reconstructions. The team categorized AnatLab's anatomical objects into organ systems to match the nursing curriculum's system approach to teaching anatomy and by anatomical region. AnatLab's anatomical objects were categorized using MeSH codes, the National Library of Medicine - Medical Subject Headings codes, which can categorize anatomical structures by body region and by organ system. MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/mesh.html).

The annotation team also annotated anatomical objects of the male that were particularly useful in the nursing curriculum, such as veins and tendons. The team began AnatLab's segmentation of the Visible Human Female in the pelvic region, completing many important objects of the region.